A Queer History of the United States (21 page)

What is a girl to do?

But if I looked like Aimee McPherson,

I’d be a good girl too.
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The lyric, by the homosexual Hart, highlights the parody inherent in McPherson’s and Sunday’s performances: they were, in essence, becoming “camp.”

Sunday and McPherson reflected the concerns of most social purity activists. They believed in a literal reading of the Bible and preached against drinking, gambling, and the relaxing of traditional gender roles. They denounced representations of immorality in film and theater, decried public dancing, strongly emphasized traditional ideas about sexuality, and were dedicated foes of evolution. Decisively formed by the Gilded Age, both were avid believers in capitalism. Sunday’s and McPherson’s popular iconography—Sunday’s “pitching” for the Lord in an exaggerated pose; McPherson’s pearls, furs, expensive cars, and her famous catchphrase “We are passing around a collection plate, be as generous as you can, and no coins please”—was nationally recognizable. Their avid heterosexuality, exaggerated gender roles, money, and success were foregrounded as the hallmarks of American Christianity.

The availability of news broadcasts and entertainment technology turned personal salvation from a private relationship with God into an all-American spectator sport. McPherson, who eschewed Hollywood, routinely relied on sophisticated show-business spectacle in her meetings. The major break from the social purity movement was seen most clearly in Sunday’s and McPherson’s embrace of a new image of Jesus, one that was radically different from the sentimentalized nineteenth-century version held dear by the social reformers. This new Jesus was a forthright, manly, decisive American who was physically strong, an adventurer, political, and certainly a capitalist.

This was the new “American” Jesus popularized in Bruce Barton’s 1925 best seller
A Young Man’s Jesus.
Here Jesus had “a strong handshake and a good sense of humor” and “shoulders . . . as broad as his chest was deep.” He was a “man’s man” as well as a “woman’s man.”
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Sunday’s virile Jesus conflated the idea of a “real man” with a “real Christian.” Sunday’s plea— “Lord save us from off-handed, flabby-cheeked, brittle-boned, weak-kneed, thin-skinned, pliable, plastic, spineless, effeminate, sissified, three-carat Christianity”—was a forceful attempt to break from what he saw as the woman-centered Christianity of the nineteenth century, in which Jesus was passive and suffering, not bold and dynamic.
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The First Red Scare—and Reform

As this new religion of stage spectacle and its image of Jesus as capitalist superpatriot were evolving, a fever-pitched theatricality animated a series of harsh crackdowns by the federal government. Called the Red Scare by historians, it brought life-changing consequences to many Americans.

The Red Scare began with the Espionage Act of 1917. The stated intention of this law was to protect the U.S. military during World War I, but its true aim was to silence speech critical of the government. This intention became clear when the Sedition Act, passed a year later, prescribed severe punishment, including extended time in prison, for anyone who “shall willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States or the Constitution of the United States.”

In a new twist on the Comstock Act, the law stipulated that the postmaster general could monitor the U.S. mails for violations of the Sedition Act. The mailing of any political material that was critical of the United States government was now prohibited. The hysteria of the Red Scare was
“an orgy of superpatriotism” and a “ferocious burst of supernationalism.” But more important, following Mary Douglas’s theories, “it was a purification rite—a reaffirmation of American values.” These “American” values were primarily the values of the social purity movement, now articulated through a different lens.
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The Espionage and Sedition Acts provoked a series of raids between 1919 and 1921, organized by U.S. attorney general Alexander Mitchell Palmer. Known as the Palmer Raids, they were aimed at known and suspected radicals, including aliens, U.S. citizens, and groups. J. Edgar Hoover, newly in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s General Intelligence Division, in less than a year had collected 150,000 names of potential suspects. In the next two years, over 20,000 people were arrested and 556 people, including Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, were deported to Russia. Palmer and Hoover cast a wide prosecutorial net. After W. E. B. Du Bois mocked their notion that African American unrest was being caused “by the Russian Bolsheviki,” they began investigating the NAACP magazine, the
Crisis.
In 1919, Hoover wrote “Radicalism and Sedition among Negro Publications,” a lengthy report that labeled the
Crisis
and similar publications as dangerous to the American way of life.

Though often conceptualized as motivated solely by anti-anarchist or anti-Bolshevik sentiment, these government actions were a response to the social and political changes that had occurred since the later nineteenth century. They included the struggles of immigrants to “become American,” the push for racial equality for African Americans, the rise of organized labor, and enormous changes in gender roles and sexuality. The anti-immigrant sentiment—aimed at recently arrived European Catholics and Jews—dovetailed with the white supremacist and eugenicist thinking of the social purity movement.

Most anti-Red propaganda included pro-marriage and pro-family sentiments. In his 1920
Americanism versus Bolshevism
, Ole Hanson noted that “Americanism is founded on family love and family life; Bolshevism is against family life” and that “Americanism stands for one wife and one country; Bolshevism stands for free love and no country.”
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Royal Baker’s 1919
The Menace of Bolshevism
used language that was directly resonant with the social purity movement:

This free love idea is undoubtedly the greatest attack against the female sex that has ever been devised. Even the lowest form of savages who indulge in the wildest spirit of cannibalism is far superior to such barbarism as this indecent, hellish state license. . . . What has free love done for Russia? Every woman can be a legalized prostitute.
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Although rarely stated in anti-Red material, clearly the new visibility of the invert, the mannish lesbian, and the pansy were instrumental in fueling panic over the sexual threat to the American family and domesticity. Cities were the prime location of suspected Bolshevik activity and presented many other threats as well. Large numbers of newly arrived immigrants lived in cities, as did many African Americans fleeing the South. Cities were also the place where homosexuals were present, evident, and establishing communities that struck at the heart of traditional gender and sexual norms.

The Red Scare began in April 1919 and was essentially over by the late summer of 1920. The great Bolshevik threat never materialized, public opinion turned against Palmer, big business began seeing the value of immigrants as workers, and more traditional ideas about sexuality and gender began to change. Nevertheless, the impact of the Red Scare was tremendous. The formation and growth of conservative, patriotic groups was startling. The American Legion, for example, was founded in May 1919; it had one million members by December and would be a core of conservatism activism for the next century. After the Red Scare, membership in the Ku Klux Klan increased, union membership decreased, antistrike legislation flourished, and forms of racism and anti-immigrant sentiment became institutionalized.
30

The hysteria of the Red Scare was a successful attempt to “freeze and preserve nineteenth-century economic liberalism and eighteenth-century political institutions.” In doing so it shaped a contemporary political philosophy that promoted whiteness as central to an American identity, Gilded Age capitalism over more equitable forms of economic structures, and traditional gender roles and sexual arrangements. Each of these characteristics would have a strong effect of the formation of an LGBT movement in the following decades.

Nevertheless, the progressive spirit continued. In 1918 union leader and presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, after being found guilty under the Espionage Act, gave this reply to the court:

Your honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison I am not free.
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Many politically active women began to understand that the people most vulnerable to social and physical abuse were ultimately hurt by benevolent protectionism, which at its worst eagerly fed Red Scare paranoia. These social justice activists argued that what America’s disenfranchised needed was the economic security and independence to protect themselves and the political skills and social tools to maintain this independence. Many of these women were emotionally involved with other women and worked on projects that affected the everyday lives of women in the workplace and in the home. Their political identifications were often radical, and in their lives and work are the origins of what we now think of as the lesbian feminist social justice movement.

These women came from a variety of backgrounds and approached their work, and lives, though a variety of political approaches. Marie Equi was born to Irish and Italian immigrant parents in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1872. At the age of twenty-one she moved to Portland, Oregon, with her partner, Bess Holcomb, who had a job offer there. Several years later they moved to San Francisco, where Equi studied medicine. Her disaster relief work after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake earned her a commendation from the United States Army. In Portland, she performed abortions and worked with Margaret Sanger, with whom she may have had a sexual relationship. A member of the Wobblies, Equi was known for her suffrage and labor organizing. She later became an anarchist. In 1915, with her partner Harriet Speckart, she adopted a child named Mary, who referred to her mothers as “ma” and “da.” In 1920, convicted under the Sedition Act, Equi began serving a three-year sentence in San Quentin State Prison. Her crime was protesting against the United States’ entry into World War I; during a rally in Portland supporting preparedness for war, she had unfurled a banner that read “
PREPARE TO DIE, WORKINGMEN, J. P. MORGAN & CO. WANT PREPAREDNESS FOR PROFIT
.”

Equi’s openly lesbian life contrasts with the life of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a noted socialist and Wobblie member who was to become her partner in 1928. Flynn was born in 1890 to working-class parents who identified themselves as socialist and were deeply connected to the Irish independence movement. At an early age, Flynn began seriously study socialism. By age sixteen she was an acclaimed pubic speaker on political issues. After meeting Emma Goldman, Flynn flirted with anarchism, but eventually joined the Wobblies.

Flynn’s work as a labor organizer often focused on the problems of women workers. In 1912 she helped run the highly successful factory strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in which ten thousand women won safer working conditions and higher wages after a three-month walkout. Flynn, with the help of Margaret Sanger, made temporary foster care arrangements in New York for the children of the striking workers. When police prevented the children from boarding the train in Lawrence, Flynn alerted the press; after national headlines, Congress threatened to investigate.

Flynn was also active in the birth control movement, and she was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920. Although Flynn was married for twelve years to a fellow organizer, and later seriously involved with anarchist Carlo Tresca, she lived from 1928 to 1936 in a relationship with Marie Equi, who had nursed her through a serious heart condition. After they separated, Flynn joined the Communist Party, which did its best to cover up her relationship with Equi.
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Flynn continued to work with the Communist Party and focused a great deal on the lives of women. In 1945 she was a delegate to the Women’s Congress in Paris, which led to the formation of the Women’s International Democratic Federation and the U.S.-based Congress for American Women.

Female camaraderie and relationships often had political implications. Trade union organizing, for example, was often split on gender lines. As a result, women union members, because they were not competing with men for attention or social status, often had both the training and the personal confidence to advance into local politics. Single-gender union organizing launched many women into electoral politics. Annie Malloy, for example, an Irish working-class woman and the head of the Telephone Operators’ Union, ran for Boston City Council in 1922. Margaret Foley, a pivotal member of the Hat Trimmers’ Union in Boston, became a major figure in the powerful Women’s Trade Union League as well as the suffrage movement. She continued her political work until the 1940s. Foley lived most of her life with her companion, Helen Elizabeth Goodnow, a suffrage worker from a well-to-do Boston family.
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For women like Annie Malloy and Margaret Foley, all-women spaces provided an intensive network of friends and political support, allowing them to interact with a larger political world and form long-term relationships across class lines.